The Emperor's New Clothes (IMDB) (Netflix)
The emperor in this speculative fable is Napoleon (Ian Holm), chafing in exile on St. Helena, and his new clothes come from Eugene (Holm again), a seaman who becomes his double to support Napoleon's plan to escape and regain control of France. The early trading-places scenes of The Little Corporal awkwardly fitting in as a member of the proletariet, and the nebbish Eugene getting in touch with his inner emperor are clever and amusing enough, but complications ensue, and the movie quickly extends beyond a conventional fish-out-of-water comedy, and deepens into a more enduring story about understanding what and who is really important.

To hold together a character study like this, Holm (one of the busiest film actors ever with over 100 roles--he was the Ash the android in Alien) needs to be terrific, and he is, as is the new Meryl Streep of accents, Iben Hjejle, the wonderfully naturalistic Danish actress who was John Cusack's girlfriend in High Fidelity. If only she'd be co-opted by Hollywood so we'd see more of her work.

A satisfying anti-blockbuster with plenty of enjoyable little moments.

Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (IMDB) (Netflix)
A friend asked just the other week, "when are you going to really paste one of these movies in a review?" I explained that that would be unlikely, since I only see movies that I expect to like, and don't go in for the summary judgments you get from those professional reviewers. Then the projector started...

The title seemed so forthright and self-effacing, but what got delivered was a shining example of Tom Stoppard's "imagination without skill gives us modern art." The Sprecher sisters, Jill (director and co-writer) and Karen (co-writer), mix the multi-threaded story structure of Short Cuts and Magnolia with a dollop of the reverse sequencing of Memento (I think, I'm still not sure) to needlessly confuse and torture the audience , while an assortment of fairly miserable people whinge about why they're unhappy and how fate controls our lives ("Have a few story ideas kicking around, but none of them add up to a complete movie? No problem, just jam 'em together into one feature and call it art!"). I usually avoid reading other reviews to avoid contaminating my own blinding cinematic insights, but after reading several of the many favorable ones just now to discover what I missed, I still don't get the genius of all that is Sprecher, or the fifteen producers (go ahead, count 'em.)

There are action-driven popcorn movies and there are character-driven art films, and then you've got muddled efforts that puzzled-but-insecure viewers assume must be brilliant. Or they're a lot smarter than me--one or the other.

Minority Report (IMDB) (Netflix)
The year is 2054, and pre-cognitive humans can foresee murders up to four days in advance, allowing the cops to arrest you before you've done anything--Attorney General John Ashcroft's recurring wet dream scenario. Tom Cruise runs the PreCrime unit, which is infallible, or so everyone thinks, but Cruise somehow is "tagged" for a murder he has no intention of committing, and is soon on the run from his own men, who have jet packs, robot spider scouts and "sick sticks" that make you puke your guts out if they touch you. It's the old find-out-who's-framing-you-before-the-cops-catch-up scam, but done with extra verve and intellectual depth.

Minority Report is based on short story by Philip K. Dick, one of the most imaginative writers of the past century, and probably one of the craziest. He wrote the books that inspired Blade Runner ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and Total Recall ("We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"), plus is said to have planted the seed for The Truman Show. Dick's a good source for Steven Spielberg, who has been increasingly attracted to darker, more complex material as his kids grow up.

The film has been processed to bleach skin tones and blow out the highlights, hinting at what botched LASIK eye surgery feels like, but looks terrific. I was less enthused about the camera shaker used during the action scenes--the theater's projector seemed about have a meltdown. The reach of the CGI effects often exceeds its grasp, there are one or two plot points that don't hold water, and the endgame is straight out of the thriller screenplay pattern book, but this film has something for just about everyone: action, plot twists, creepy characters and wit (the large number of product placement bits look like my old consulting firm's scenarios about future of consumer shopping, serve nicely as comic relief, and probably funded a fair chunk of the budget). Underlying the glitz is a tender and affecting commentary on the nature of loss, and Samantha Morton is especially touching as one of the pre-cogs.

The best big movie of the year so far.

The Bourne Identity (IMDB) (Netflix)
The bad guys always rely on extreme negative reinforcement ("the price of failure is death, Number 32"), which doesn't seem like a very good recruiting or performance management strategy. Matt Damon is the man who can't remember his name or why he has two bullet holes in his back, but starts to put the pieces together with the help of Franka (Run Lola Run) Potente while fending off a bunch of hit men sent by his CIA handler, Chris Cooper, who has been ordered to clean up the mess Damon created, but can't remember.

This is an old-fashioned thriller that thankfully doesn't have a terrorism angle, special effects or more than one explosion, just lots of bent sheet metal from a Paris car chase (the vintage Mini Cooper almost steals the movie) and a creative way to break one's fall. Damon is well cast as the vulnerable-but-competent killer, and Potente compares almost favorably to Faye Dunaway's terrific performance in Three Days of the Condor (a highly recommended rental). It doesn't have the emotional depth or suspense that "Condor" had, or even the more recent "Ronin" (another rental recommendation), but there are some nice moments between Damon and Potente, and a sense of realism that very recent thrillers have missed.

Windtalkers (IMDB) (Netflix)
Director John Woo (Mission Impossible II, Face/Off) reaches beyond his center, which is the slick, modern-day action pic, and make a World War II movie about the Navajo codetalkers. The U.S. developed a code based in the Navajo language, which at the time had never been translated into German or Japanese, and used Navajo soldiers as human encryption/decryption machines, which resulted in an incredibly efficient and unbreakable communications system. Taking the story beyond docudrama is the screenwriters' assumption that the military valued the code so much that they assigned minders to protect it, meaning first to protect the codetalkers, but more importantly, to kill them if they were in danger of being captured by the Japanese. Nicholas Cage is the self-loathing Marine assigned to one of the Navajo and, given that a bunch of his buddies just died because he followed orders, he's not at all happy about this unsettling assignment.

As you might imagine, the battle scenes are pretty intense, although not as impressive as you'd expect from Woo (the grenade and mortar explosions are juiced past credibility, and he seems otherwise constrained by the restrictions of a period piece), it gets hokey and there's a redneck racist storyline that doesn't work very well, but Cage does a great job of riding the curmudgeon/hero ridge and his performance is one of the few things that makes this effort worth a visit.

Bad Company (IMDB) (Netflix)
It's uneven, it's derivative and the action scenes are sub-professional, but it's got Chris Rock strapping this action comedy on his back like Magic Johnson did with the Lakers in Game 6 of the 1980 Finals against the Sixers (Kareem was injured and Johnson, a guard, played center and scored 42 points). The Lakers won the game and the series, and Bad Company manages to keep the audience in the movie, with difficulty.

Rock is the screw-up ticket scalper and chess hustler whose girlfriend is about to leave him, and to add to his problems, the CIA insists that he help them save the world by impersonating the twin brother he never knew he had and buying a suitcase nuke off of the bad guys before some worse guys do. There are the typical training scenes, some "I don't think he's going to be ready in time" hand-wringing and off course the love-hate relationship between Rock and a slumming Anthony Hopkins (Merchant and Ivory must be on sabbatical). With all that going against it however, Rock's boyish irrepressibility camouflages the film's many flaws. As one exiting patron said, "much better than Sum of All Fears."

CQ (IMDB) (Netflix)
In the Francis Ford Coppola family, everyone makes movies, and CQ is son Roman's first theatrical film as director. It's a meta-movie, set in late '60s Paris, with Jeremy Davies (the coward in Saving Private Ryan) as the editor of Barbarella-like sci-fi flick that's missing an ending, and Angela Lindvall as the leather-jumpsuited super spy. Davies is also making a pretentious, "honest" personal film about his life, and finds himself bouncing between art and commerce, and reality and movie reality. It doesn't help him that Lindvall, a supermodel-cum-actress, is almost perfect as the bimbosity-free sex kitten distraction, and that he becomes responsible for salvaging the film after the director gets fired by producer Giancarlo Giannini (you may not recognize the name, but he's been the premier Italian actor for four decades).

I went to this because I had just finished his dad's biography, liked the preview, and had sat next to Roman on a flight from Paris to Chicago a couple of years ago (probably while he was working on this movie). We didn't say a word to each beyond "hello" (he has that kind of face that doesn't invite conversation, and a famous person's way of not making eye contact). There are a host of themes running through the film (obsession about work, wanting an alter ego, the need for self-expression)--maybe too many, because none of them really stick emotionally, and Davies isn't able to get you to really care about his problems. For lovers of the filmmaking process and slightly campy bad-movie humor.

The Sum of All Fears (IMDB) (Netflix)
My frustration stemming from this latest Tom Clancy thriller exists on two levels: the flawed, creaky and politically wussified plot and the all-too-vivid reminder, particularly given the real-world revelations of the past week or so, of the government's inability to communicate vital information in a timely manner.

Calista Flockhart's beau Harrison Ford has been traded in for a younger Jack Ryan model (no doubt Ford's ex-wife thinks that's fitting), Ben Affleck, as the CIA analyst who, straight out of The Hunt for Red October, is the only American with 20-20 insight into the Russians, who are being set up by some Neo-Nazis (a convenient oil-free villain) as the patsy for a successful nuclear explosion in the U.S. (no spoiler here, check the trailer). Affleck discovers some key information that even the FBI would have passed along, but of course he can't, which escalates everything into a cliffhanger that Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove handled more courageously.

The above rant is mostly a time-delayed detonation of my own that's occurring while thinking through this review--there are plenty of things to enjoy, like Affleck being a worthy successor to the Ryan mantle, Morgan Freeman gives his usual mensch-like performance (he badly needs some roles that exercise more of his skills, however), Liev Schreiber adds some depth to wet-work spook Mr. Clark. Director Phil Alden Robinson manages to give this Clancy episode a much artier look than its predecessors (Field of Dreams is his sole other film of note--the "directed by Phil Alden Robinson" tag line in the commercials made it sound like he was a Francis Ford Coppola-esque auteur, which is ironic, since he clearly went to school on Coppola's montage technique for the ending). The safety tip for this one is: go ahead and see the movie, just don't reflect on it later.

Dogtown and Z-Boys (IMDB) (Netflix)
A narcissistic but entertaining documentary of a group of skateboarders in the 1970s, who grew out of the Southern California surfer culture, transformed the sport and, in their eyes, were the inspiration for the X Games and snowboarder culture. This film shows how you can take a bunch of grainy photographs, 8mm footage, and present-day interviews and put together an interesting, evocative story about the birth and evolution of a sub-culture. Were the History Channel this edgy...

Narrated by Sean Penn (holy shades of Ridgemont High), it chronicles the history of Dogtown, which connected the south of Santa Monica, Venice and Ocean Park, California, and the wrong-side-of-the-tracks kids who translated surfing to the dried-up pools of the California drought, took advantage of new technology (from clay to urethane wheels) and created a big-business sport. The only downer at the end is the realization that the film was made by some of the Z-Boys themselves, adding after the fact a sense of self-promotion and re-living of the past, but it's a piece of Americana that hasn't been shown, at least not nearly this definitively.

About a Boy (IMDB) (Netflix)
My mom said, "nothing special" and after all it stars Hugh Grant, so I was prepared to not like this message comedy much at all. He's is a self-professed emotional island who's happy to live off his dad's song-writing royalties, and would be quite the cad if he weren't such a ne'er-do-well. He does need the occasional girlfriend, however, and cooks up what he thinks is the perfect solution--recently single moms who need a transitional guy for awhile until they realize they're not ready for a deep relationship, and will dump him before he has to do the same to them. Brilliant strategy, but the execution is flawed, and he ends up being adopted by a hasn't-hit-his-stride kid with a mom with more than enough issues to make Hugh look like a role model.

Well-managed expectations aside, "Boy" does have a few things going for it, such as a Nick "High Fidelity" Hornby novel for a starting point that keeps the sap from flowing too heavily, and a Grant who's lost the prep school 'do and is virtually stammer-free. Unlike the TV sitcom Seinfeld, in which the point was that there was no point, "About a Boy" is very much about the message; our relationships are what makes it all worthwhile. Women will be satisfied by the ending, and guys can give in on the "which movie" decision without only a little pain, and build up points for Sum of All Fears or Undercover Brother.

Insomnia (IMDB) (Netflix)
They say that cops and criminals live two sides of the same psychosis, and any number of films and books have worked this theme, but few as smartly as this drama. A teenage girl has been murdered in small Alaska town, and two Los Angeles detectives have been dispatched to ostensibly help solve the case, but also to get the hell out of Dodge as an internal affairs investigation heats up. Al Pacino is the famous homicide dick with some secrets, Hilary Swank the eager, hero-worshiping local and Robin Williams as the key suspect, and the three get hung up in a complex cross-linkage of motivations and, for lack of a decent piece of non-jargon, co-opetition, that knocks together means, ends and living with consequences.

Director Christopher Nolan, who wrote and directed the innovative Memento, adapts a well-regarded 1997 Norwegian film of the same name (currently playing on the Independent Film Channel). Because this is a remake, you can bemoan the lack of Hollywood creativity (this is a summer of remakes and sequels), but the fact is that very few people saw the original, and a lot of people are going to pay to see this version--and they should. It's atmospheric, clever, and well-acted all-around; Pacino is at his weariest, Swank hits all the right notes as she loses her naïveté, and Williams exudes a restrained schtick-less creepiness that shows just how scary-looking a guy he is when he's not mugging for the audience.

The Salton Sea (IMDB) (Netflix)
A stylish, imaginative, violent noir featuring Val Kilmer's first decent role in years. The film begins near the end, with Kilmer playing trumpet in a room that's becoming enveloped in flames, then flashes back to show how he got to that sorry state. The setting is Southern California's methedrine sub-culture, which is not for the easily appalled--Vincent D'Onofrio is the completely warped "cook" and dealer nicknamed "Pooh Bear" because he lost his nose to the drug and wears a plastic substitute ("Badly done facial prosthetics--the anti-drug"). Why Kilmer gets mixed up in all this and what he does to extricate himself makes for an original, if more than a little disturbing story. Peter Sarsgaard has a nice turn as Val's naive, trusting fellow tweeker, and there are sprinkles of I-shouldn't-be-laughing-at-that humor.

If you liked Memento and/or Sexy Beast, you'll probably be on solid ground.

Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones (IMDB) (Netflix)
When you're down and out, send in the clones. The Star Wars saga picks up steam after director George Lucas hit the excitement reset button in Episode I, featuring a half-dozen action sequences; the introduction of Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), Luke's dad and you-know-who; a romance between Anakin and Senator-demoted-from-Queen) Amidalah (Natalie Portman, who reveals that she's been spending plenty of time with her Abdomenizer) and some confusing webs of intrigue that only aficionados will attempt to unravel.

Although the film was shot entirely digitally, I saw it in a conventional film projection theater on a medium-sized screen, and it looked pretty good. The sophisticated computer-generated imagery effects support some extremely ambitious and effective action scenes and art direction--if only Lucas's dialogue-writing skills had followed the same learning curve (if I heard Obi-Wan say to Anakin "blah-blah-blah, my young apprentice" one more time, there were going to be some non-digital special effects generated all over the theater floor). The romance has minimal heat, and the movie feels like a grand Act II, which in essence it is, being the set-up for third/sixth/last episode, which will be released in 2005.

Happenstance ("The Beating of the Butterfly's Wings") (IMDB) (Netflix)
A slightly conceptual morsel-ette about the random interactions that determine how our life turns out (the beating of the butterly's wings in one part of the world sparks a set of events that become a hurricane in another part of the globe--the chaos theory metaphor) and the web of connections people belong to. Audrey Tautou, from Amelie, heads a cast of dozens of people who run into each other, don't run into each other, make choices, or let chance determine those choices for them.

There are some nice little moments sprinkled throughout, but the film never builds to hurricane velocity, or much of any kind of dramatic vortex. The butterfly might have been flapping his wings off, but he did it in a sealed container. For a more affecting take on the power of chance, try renting Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Unfaithful (IMDB) (Netflix)
From 1934 until the late '60s, Hollywood films were subject to The Production Code, which --among its many specific rules--required that any character's bad deeds were punished. "Unfaithful" could not have been made under that system, but is a better movie for escaping those constraints.

Diane Lane is the wife who strays, and with this role, Richard Gere has ridden his career arc from American Gigolo to cuckold. Olivier Martinez is the young seducer, and succeeds in titillating all the women in audience while making the guys just want to smack his skinny little French--well, you get the picture. The performances are strong (director Adrian Lyne, who did 9-1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction and Flashdance, demanded an exhausting number of takes from the actors) and the technique of pumping smoke into the set provides an arty feel. The kid who plays Dewey (my favorite character) on "Malcolm in the Middle" does a good job as the couple's son. What takes this film up a notch is that there's no convenient justification made for anybody's actions: the affair, what happens when it all goes pear-shaped, and the aftermath. In one respect, no one gets off easy, but strict moralists will be frustrated.

Hollywood Ending (IMDB) (Netflix)
Woody Allen's latest confection, this time his self-referential premise has him as a washed-up movie director, who has developed psychosomatic blindness just as he's starting filming his comeback picture. Tea Leoni is his ex-wife and movie producer, who has wheedled her new fiance and studio head, Treat Williams, into letting Allen shoot the picture. The comedy comes from the lengths that Allen goes to in not letting anyone know he's blind as he goes through production, and the Hollywood jokes.

If you like Woody, and you get references like "can a hyphenate marry a below-the-line person? I don't know, check with Legal", then this picture's for you. Otherwise, it's Woody doing the Woody thing, down to the tweed jacket, black glasses and the whining dialogue, which can often be grating, but sometimes hilarious, as when he flips back and forth between discussing the picture and berating Leoni for leaving him and hooking up with Williams. I'd also would have liked more scenes with Barney Cheng, as the geeky translator for the Chinese cinematographer.

Spider-Man (IMDB) (Netflix)
Casting Tobey Maguire, a scrawny, vegetarian, yoga-practicing actor who specializes in playing troubled characters, seemed like a colossal case of mis-casting for a super hero. But this is Spider-Man, the anti-hero super hero, who can't catch a break, even when he's saving scores of would-be crime victims and pawns of the Green Goblin's madness, making Maguire the perfect choice, as long he bulks up a little.

Compared to the campy-cartoonish Superman movies, this is a much darker, more textured and more interesting story that you'd expect from the stylish Sam Raimi, who's the only director I know of these days who wears a coat and tie to work and is said to have been a Spider-Man fanatic since he was a kid. Although the action sequences stretch the abilities of computer-generated imagery, Raimi knows how to blend special effects and camera moves as well as any movie director, and when Spider-Man swings Tarzan-like through the city, he really swings. Willem Defoe makes for a pretty malevalent Green Goblin, and Kirsten Dunst more than holds her own as Mary Jane, Spidey's love interest. Nice round of applause at the end of the film--a true crowd-pleaser.

PS--There was a short-but-incredibly-effective trailer for Ang Lee's The Hulk, starring the Delta Force stud in Black Hawk Down, Eric Bana, and I've never heard such a moan of disappointment when the words "May 2003" came up at the end. This movie already has "want to see" scores that rival Attack of the Clones.

Time Out (IMDB) (Netflix--na)
I knew this guy who graduated from law school, passed the bar, and never practiced law. Instead, he pursued an acting/writing career and did temp jobs to pay the rent, using a secretary friend at a real law firm to cover for him when Mom called ("he's in a meeting Mrs. Jones, I'll have him call you as soon as frees up"). He kept it up for years. The lead character in this French film goes much further, hiding his firing from his family for months by living in his car when he's supposedly on the road and keeping in touch via cell phone (presence-without-location being one of the many unanticipated benefits of wireless technology). He also finds some less-than-scrupulous ways to maintain an income. This might be a comedy premise, but it's not that, not at all.

As you might imagine, this guy lacks a sustainable business strategy, and his stress climbs along with the height of the house of cards he builds. The movie's lighting is cold and the music somber, and the performance is appropriately detached for someone who has checked out from the working world, although it's not as interesting as the acting in World Traveler (which has a much thinner plot, however). Pay attention to the ending--you might initially read it as Hollywood, but you'd be missing some nice ambiguity and irony notes.

The Cat's Meow (IMDB) (Netflix)
A speculation about a notorious weekend on William Randolph Hearst's yacht, where one of the guests died a few days after the festivities, by director Peter Bogdanovich (the wunderkind director of Last Picture Show and Paper Moon in the seventies, who quickly self-destructed and is finally making a comeback; known more recently as Dr. Melfi's occasional shrink on The Sopranos). It has many of the same elements as Gosford Park, only simplified and more didactic, with a surprisingly serious Joanna Lumley (yes, from Absolutely Fabulous) providing some book-ending (and to subscriber Janet Borggren's eyes, unnecessary) narration.

Figuring out who's going to get it isn't all that difficult, and you can see how it's going to happen a couple hundred yards away, but that's not the point, and there are some notable performances by Edward Herrmann (Hearst), Kirsten Dunst (his mistress Marion Davies), and everyone's favorite cross-dressing comedian Eddie Izzard, as Charlie Chaplin. Watchable, but certainly not mandatory viewing that's best appreciated by film buffs.

World Traveler (IMDB) (Netflix)

It's a shame actor Billy Crudup doesn't work in bigger films; other than the wonderful Almost Famous, he's focused mostly on indie efforts like Jesus's Son, Inventing the Abbotts and Waking the Dead, difficult dramas that don't even try to be mass-market. Here he's a New York architect who has a premature mid-life crisis, leaves his wife and young son, and hits the road to find, well, something, but even he's not sure what that is.

This film might try your patience--it's totally character-driven, and the restrained dialogue is as spare as the action. Yet watching Crudup, and Julianne Moore as one of the people he meets along the way, makes the journey somehow worthwhile, because they're able to vividly communicate their damaged psyches without saying or doing much of anything, rather than through tiresome made-for-TV-movie histrionics.